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A scary strategic problem - no oil

I have never understood the batteries vs. fuel cells debate. What is the major difference? Don't both of them use chemistry to store and release energy? Since fuel cells appear to be technically challenging, why don't we use batteries now?

A Theory:
Oil owns the transportation sector of our economy. It doesn't want to compete with cheap power and that's exactly what battery powered cars would do. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that oil subsidizes the auto industry. 
 
Kirkhill said:
Are we talking about high efficiency burners here - which I believe they are - or putting the types of scrubbers common at incinerator plants in Europe, being currently applied to western Canadian plants or intended for those that were destroyed for McGuinty's photo-op.

How long do you think it is going take to get all those dozens of ethanol plants on line when China is sucking up all the available supply of industrial metals for the dozens of coal and hydro plants it is building.  You can't get a titanium heat exchanger without a two year delay.  And bundles of them - forget it.  Not to mention all the harvesting and transportation.  It will take you at least until 2020 to get your ethanol plants up to anything like a useful capacity.
 
Electric cars are indeed a viable alternative for short hops by urbanites to the nearest Starbucks.  A golf cart would do as well.  They are absolute non-starters in most of Canada, including much of Suburbia.

There are, however, better ways to use the hydrocarbons than in the current generation of ICEs. But that is a whole other story.

Cheers sir.  :salute:

As for coal plants I'm talking about carbon and sulfur recapturing. And making them "so called clean" even though they still really won't be clean.

For ethanol it will take about 5 years to get these plants up and running.  And Cellulosic ethanol can use a variety of  waste products in general not just biomass.  In fact there is currently more ethanol being produced than being consumed right now and many of the crop based ethanol producers are at risk of going under.  Ethanol distribution has not kept up with ethanol production.  And the price of things like corn are putting pressure on crop based ethanol producers.

As for Algae based biofuels there are other ways to extract the water from algae other than expending energy for evaporation.  This is where many of the recent breakthrough's have been.

I don't see why there would be a big push to keep coal power in Canada.  Coal represents a small percentage of the power produced in most parts of Canada.  In Ontario Coal only represents about 15% of the power in the province.  And this could be easily be replaced with nuclear power which is just as economical if not more economical.

Wind power is not as expensive as you think.  On a small home scale it's about 11 cents/KWh on a large scale its about 7 cents/KWh.  And these numbers have been falling fast and show no signs of stopping.

Solar 5 years ago was 30 cents/KWh.  Today its 15 cents/KWh and also falling very fast.  Canadian tire is now selling solar powered home generators.

As for electric cars.  The Chevy Volt is expected to have a range of over 1000km's on 40L of gasoline when using the engine to regenerate the battery and an electric only range of 62kms.  I don't call that short range.

ICE's have an efficiency of ~25%.  Electric motors ~95+%.
Electric motors can go as high as 15000 RPM and have a virtually flat torque curve.  And don't require a transmission (Which gives ~20% efficiency loss).

The only issue to date with electric motors is not size or power.  But it is energy storage.  The next generation of batteries will solve this problem.  The Tesla Roadster electric car with rather primitive Li-Ion batteries has a range of 300kms. http://www.teslamotors.com/

The Chevy Volt and GM's e-flex system will use a small advanced Li-Ion battery that the car can use to go 62kms on electric only range.  And can be recharged by plugging into the wall at home.  It also has a small gas engine.  The gas engine does not power the wheels.  It is only used to recharge the battery and this is a big advantage.  ICE's are most efficient in a very narrow RPM range.  With the engine only used to recharge the battery it can be optimized to run at only one RPM.  It will be like getting highway mileage all the time except better.

Trains made by GM already use the E-flex concept.  Trains today use electric motors for their main source of propulsion and a diesel engine to recharge the battery.

City buses already use hybrid systems with a combination of electric motors and a diesel engine.

Sorry about the long blurb about electric motors but there is a lot of misconceptions about electric motors. I'm a mechanical engineer (hence my name) and my background is in the automotive industry.
 
leftcoaster said:
I have never understood the batteries vs. fuel cells debate. What is the major difference? Don't both of them use chemistry to store and release energy? Since fuel cells appear to be technically challenging, why don't we use batteries now?

A Theory:
Oil owns the transportation sector of our economy. It doesn't want to compete with cheap power and that's exactly what battery powered cars would do. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that oil subsidizes the auto industry. 

Well there is big research into both or a combination of both right now.  Currently both have issues.  But both are also very close to production ready.

Batteries:
Cost - They are current very expensive the Tesla Roadster retails for ~100K most of that cost is batteries.  The next generation of batteries will be cheaper.  The Li-Ion battery on the volt is expected to cost around 8000 dollars.  That might sound a lot.  But powering a car with electricity is far cheaper than using gasoline.  On a vehicle like the volt I would stand to save ~$90 a month on energy costs and I drive about 2000Kms a month.

Safety - Many older battery designs are not that safe.  I think everybody knows about the Exploding laptops with Li-Ion batteries.  Newer Li-Ion batteries are far safer.  New cathode and electrode chemistries have made them far safer.

Operating environment- many batteries performance degrade when operating at either very low or high temperatures.  Again new Li-Ion batteries actually work better a low temperatures and can function at temperatures as high as 200oC

Weight - Older batteries are heavy.  New Li-Ion batteries are light.

Durability and longevity - Older NiMH batteries only lasted about 5 years.  New advanced Li-Ion are good for about 10 years.

Fuel Cells:
Use hydrogen with oxygen (from air) to produce electricity (reverse electrolysis).

Cost -  Currently fuel cells are expensive.  They use a lot of rare earth metals to produce

Durability - Current generation fuel cells will only last about 80000 kms.

Hydrogen - Fuel cells need large bulky heavy hydrogen tanks on board.  Also hydrogen production is not very wide spread and most hydrogen today is very expensive and produced from fossil fuels.


I personally think battery technology will win out in the end.  But fuel cells are close.  The next generation of fuel cells are supposed to last ~160000 Km's and are becoming cheaper and more efficient.  And there are new and cheaper ways to produce hydrogen.

But batteries have the advantage of not needing new infrastructure to use (just plug in at home).  And battery technology in my opinion already exists to make a viable electric car.
 
TCBF said:
How do you keep the batteries from freezing in the winter?

A Li-Ion battery is made of a variety of metals and polymers so there is nothing to freeze.  It's already solid.  Older Li-Ion batteries did have liquid cathode and electrodes but new designs have eliminated this.
 
Batteries are not very high density energy storage media; consider the very limited range of the GM EV-1 with almost a ton of batteries, compared the the range of a car running on a tank of liquid hydrocarbons. (The short range of the GM "Volt" on battery power also requires a pretty hefty battery pack compared to the 1000km on a small fuel tank). Fuel cells run so long as there is fuel and oxygen, and SOFC (Solid Oxide Fuel Cells) run directly from hydrocarbons without reformulation. The downside of current SOFC's is they need to be heated to 10000C to start, which raises a lot of material science issues.

Fuel cells also do not deal with transients very well, so "blipping" the throttle or getting rapid bursts of power to accelerate will require some sort of auxiliary systems. Serial Electric vehicles like the "Volt"are simply a means of taking advantage of the high energy density of hydrocarbon fuels with an electric drive (and Ferdinand Porsche designed serial electric vehicles prior to WW II).
 
a_majoor said:
Batteries are not very high density energy storage media; consider the very limited range of the GM EV-1 with almost a ton of batteries, compared the the range of a car running on a tank of liquid hydrocarbons. (The short range of the GM "Volt" on battery power also requires a pretty hefty battery pack compared to the 1000km on a small fuel tank). Fuel cells run so long as there is fuel and oxygen, and SOFC (Solid Oxide Fuel Cells) run directly from hydrocarbons without reformulation. The downside of current SOFC's is they need to be heated to 10000C to start, which raises a lot of material science issues.

Fuel cells also do not deal with transients very well, so "blipping" the throttle or getting rapid bursts of power to accelerate will require some sort of auxiliary systems. Serial Electric vehicles like the "Volt"are simply a means of taking advantage of the high energy density of hydrocarbon fuels with an electric drive (and Ferdinand Porsche designed serial electric vehicles prior to WW II).

While I agree that battery technology has not reached the energy density of other fuels.  But it doesn't have too.  Because battery to electric motor operation is 3 times more efficient therefore the energy density of batteries needs to only be 1/3 of that of other fuels to become viable.  GM's EV-1 used battery technology that is 20 years old.

The battery in the volt though a fair size is not huge and it weighs less than 200lbs.  Newer polymer Li-Ion batteries are lighter and have far more energy density than previous generation batteries.
http://bioage.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/volt1.png

Now I'm not saying that fuel cells don't have a chance.  I personally think battery technology will win out.  There are some very promising battery technologies on the horizon.  And latest generation nanophosphate Li-Ion batteries are already a viable alternative.  But fuel cells are also very close.  GM's Gen 5 fuel cell that will be in the prototype phase next year is supposed to have a durability of 160000Kms and be significantly cheaper then their Gen 4 fuel cell system.

The Chevy Volt is built off of GM's E-Flex system which has the ability to adapt to different technologies.  So what ever is best in terms of cost benefit will win out.

This article is almost a year old.  But will at least give you an Idea what GM has planed for E-Flex.  And I think this is the future in the automotive industry.
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2007/01/the_volt_may_be.html

 
Mechanical (i.e. flywheels and compressed gasses) and electrochemical reactions (batteries) have severe limitations in energy density (hence storage/range issues). Chemical energy is well known and hydrocarbons have the most advantages for day to day use.

Using some sort of nuclear reaction is the next step up; energy density is orders of magnitude beyond chemical energy, but there are several obvious disadvantages, particularly for mobile applications. If this idea is real and workable, then there may be nuclear jets and small scale distributed nuclear power in our future:

http://www.matus1976.com/features/isomer.htm

Nuclear Isomer energy storage and Quantum Nucleaonic Reactors

Nuclear Isomers are an exciting new development in the field of Nuclear physics. They are, essentially, a nuclear storage battery. Just as atoms can have electrons in excited states, atomic nuclei can have nucleons (protons and nuetrons) in excited states as well, but unlike atoms with electrons in excited states, the nucleons can remain in their excited states for extended lengths of time. The excited nucleons can randomly decay on their own, and have representative half-lifes as well. Not all atoms can have stable excited nucleons, and typically larger atoms are more likely to have longer half-lifes of the excited nucleons. But, the theory goes, the nucleons of an atom can be excited to higher energy levels by bombarding them with gamma rays, and then triggered to release their energy on demand by hitting them with lower energy photons, Ultra Violet or X-Rays. These would amount immensely dense energy storage devices, with power densities per unit wieght reaching a theorhetical limit near that of low end fusion reactions!

Best Batteries - 300 Wh/Kg
Fuel Cells (aluminum) - 4,000 Wh/kg
Isomer Nucleonic - 800,000,000 Wh/Kg
Fusion - 90,000,000,000 Wh/Kg

Developments in Isomers

021903 - 'Nuclear-powered' drone aircraft on drawing boards
The 'Nuclear-powered' could be considered a misnomer, as this effect is not necessarily nuclear but is also not chemical. The US Military is performing Feasibility studies on Quantum Necleonic Reactor powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. A nuclear UAV would generate thrust by using the energy of these gamma rays to produce a jet of heated air, using this power source, they conclude, could extend the UAV's flight time from hours to months.
from - http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993406


081301 - Physicists Challenge Reports of Accelerated Decay of Nuclear Excited State
Physicists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in collaboration with scientists at Los Alamos and Argonne national laboratories, have new results that strongly contradict recent reports claiming an accelerated emission of gamma rays from the nuclear isomer 31-yr. hafnium-178, and the opportunity for a controlled release of energy. They said "In other words, the X-ray irradiation did not decrease the time it takes for hafnium to decay; a result that Becker and the team claim is consistent with nuclear physics" The nucleonic excitation has nothing to do with the weak nuclear radioactive decay of the host atom. So I am not sure why it matters that the LLNL found that the X-Ray irradiation did not 'decrease the time it takes for hafnium to decay' It shouldn’t after all, it should, however, decrease the time it takes for the excited nucleons to decay to a non-excited state.
from - http://www.llnl.gov/llnl/06news/NewsReleases/2001/NR-01-08-05.html


May 1999 - Physics Web - Light plays tricks with nuclei
A good description of the expirement and of note - "...A single nucleus can hold up to several mega-electron-volts. This means that one gram of material could store several giga-joules of energy"
from - http://physicsweb.org/article/world/12/5/3

Links -

University of Texas at Dallas - ESSENTIAL FUNDAMENTALS OF QUANTUM NUCLEONICS
http://www.utdallas.edu/research/quantum/Tutorial.htm
 
My response. And it is a long one. With no apologies for length or content.


MechEng said:
As for coal plants I'm talking about carbon and sulfur recapturing. And making them "so called clean" even though they still really won't be clean.

Good.  We're talking about the same thing.

For ethanol it will take about 5 years to get these plants up and running.

It may take 5 years to get A Plant up and running.  You won't get "dozens" of plants up and running in 5 years. Just try organizing the fleets of cement trucks you will need.

And Cellulosic ethanol can use a variety of  waste products in general not just biomass. 

Biomass is any material which originated from a living organism.  Essentially it is any carbonaceous material from any plant or animal.  Cellulose is a carbonaceous material from a plant - any plant - all plants.  All cellulose is by definition "biomass".  There are other "biomass" sources - like living bugs or like dead fish, dead cows, dead people and excreta from all of the above  -  but none of them qualify as "cellulosic".  It is possible to use them with other foods to grow plants containing cellulose but the carbon in the cellulose comes from carbon sources like molasses and sugar.

Cellulose is Biomass. Ethanol from Cellulose, cellulosic ethanol, is ethanol from biomass. 

And the conversion process takes energy and the more you have to do, the more energy you have to put in, the less energy is available.

In fact there is currently more ethanol being produced than being consumed right now and many of the crop based ethanol producers are at risk of going under.  Ethanol distribution has not kept up with ethanol production.  And the price of things like corn are putting pressure on crop based ethanol producers.

Welcome to the world of economic subsidies and the law of unintended consequences.  Refer to a chap name of Adam Smith with respect to being able to plan an economy.

As for Algae based biofuels there are other ways to extract the water from algae other than expending energy for evaporation.  This is where many of the recent breakthrough's have been.

Perhaps you are thinking of filtering? The water won't free drain.

Ultra-filtration and reverse osmosis? First you have to chop things up really small then apply lots of pressure, lots of surface area and lots of time - and it still leaves you with water trapped in wet fibre and sugar trapped in water.  The wet fiber will not burn and the sugar needs to be separated from the water before it can be burnt.

Pressing? Energy intensive and achieves the same results.

Centrifugation? Marginally less energy intensive than pressing but achieves similar results.

Usually these processes are utilized in combination with each other, along with heating to disrupt cell structure or to provide the growing conditions for digestion, and multi-effect evaporators and dryers to achieve economical outcomes.  And the more the processes that are involved the more that has to be done, the more by-products produced that have to be sold or treated and the less product available for the primary stream.

Exotics like Supercritical Fluid Extraction or Molecular Distillation - don't get me started.  Those are still evaporative processes but really expensive ones that still require chopping big bits into little bits befor they can be processed.  More processing, more money, less product.  I had one plant many years ago that was designed to take half of the entire supply of cowhides from the Alberta kill and convert it in a pharmaceutical.  It required a massive building, three or four highly secretive and compartmentalized process rooms, one of which required my centrifuges (over 2 million just for the centrifuges) to produce a "product" measured in grams.  Think of that: Millions in investmet supported by grams of product from hundreds of tonnes of raw materials - which happened to be a form of biomass - which were mainly turned into unusable wastes.
But the value of the product was the only way to support the extremely expensive process.

I had a couple of prospective projects where the investor was being asked to convert their dead fish or dead chickens (and money) into ethanol using bugs.  The advantage was that much of the size reduction and cell denaturation had already been accomplished making meals and oils for feed.  The problem was that the conversion process was a sideline for the bugs in question. They still had to eat.  To make the process work the bugs had to be fed a steady diet of molasses or sugar.

I don't see why there would be a big push to keep coal power in Canada.

Because coal is the purest grade of carbon we have available on the planet.

Gasoline is Coal plus Hydrogen in the form of Benzene Rings

Sugars are Coal in the form of rings of 6 carbons, just like Benzene and Coal, with water stuck to it as Hydrogens and OHs.

Starch is Coal plus Water in the form of chains of the same sugars cellulose is made from but untwisted so that they become accessible for digestion

Cellulose is Coal plus Water in the form of chains of sugars strung together so that they are unavailable for animals to digest with the bugs and enzymes they have available to them.  Cow hire out the task.

Ethanol is nothing more than finely divide Coal plus water.  The 6 Carbon ring is busted into 3x 2 Carbon chunks and more water is added.

Methane/Natural Gas is just the most finely divide Coal available but with Hydrogen added.

So, to sum up, to achieve the energy available in coal from any other source one must first either remove Water or Hydrogen. 

Bound Hydrogen has the advantage that it at least Releases energy when removed from Carbon thus helping and greatly improves your energy balance. But it It also reduces the density of the fuel.  A little density reduction to convert the solid coal to the liquid benzene is a good thing because you actually gain a little on bulk density and a lot on convenience.  A large density reduction from solid to coal to a gas creates more problems as storage densities decrease and handling becomes more difficult.  You don’t have to worry about coal leaking past gaskets.

Ethanol requires the removal of water to generate energy:  CH3CH2OH or 2C+2H2+ H2O.

Breaking the two Carbons apart releases energy.
Busting off the Hydrogen releases more energy.
Removing the water REQUIRES energy.
(Of course this all assumes an Oxygen rich environment)

On balance the burning of Ethanol in an oxygen rich environment releases enough energy to get rid of its internal water and leaves a significant surplus.

But in order to get there you had to get rid of the water in the Glucose to make Ethanol.

Glucose equals C6H12O6 or 6C+0H2+ 6H2O versus 3x(2C+2H2+ H2O) or 6C+6H2+3H2O

Glucose has fewer energy rich Hydrogen bonds and more energy intensive OH bonds for an equivalent number of those high energy Carbon-Carbon bonds.

Starch and Cellulose contain still more water for each Carbon-Carbon bond and less Hydrogen.

Both of them are equally bio-available commercially be selecting the right bugs.

On the market starches and sugars are harder to come by than cellulose because plants create less and humans eat them.  Most animals can fend for themselves with cellulose.  Lions and tigers are another matter.

That makes cellulose the cheaper source of water-drenched carbon-bonds.

Cellulose and starch both bind water to those structural H and OH bonds.  That makes the Carbon still more water-logged and unavailable.  And the only way to remove that bound water is by heat.  Mechanical means like pressing and centrifugation will not get the job done. Period.

That bound water then binds to more water and somewhere  along the way the bonds become loose enough that some of the water becomes free draining ie when the force of gravity supplies enough energy to break those weak water to water bonds.

But sugar is very efficient at spreading itself around so as to associate itself with lots of water and dissolving  while cellulose is very efficient at creating structures that wrap around water and trap it.

All of which makes those Carbon-Carbon bonds harder to reach.

And all of which begs the question of where the Carbon comes from in the first place ---- Lessee, at 150 ppm how much air do I have to pass over a field or through a greenhouse to capture a tonne of Carbon from the air and convert it into plants which I can chop up, mechanically extract water, digest the cellulose to dextrose, ferment the dextrose to ethanol, distil the ethanol to thermally extract water and generate enough ethanol to give me the same energy equivalency as digging up a tonne of Coal?

Coal is carbon.  Wood is carbon.  Corn is carbon.  Sugarcane is carbon.  Bark, hay and straw are carbon. Algae are carbon. Cellulose, starch and sugars are carbon. Gasoline, diesel, natural gas, shale oil and tar sands are carbon. Heck, even proteins are carbon.  Bullsh*t is carbon.

Why is carbon such a valuable energy source? Because, if it is dry enough, it lights when you put a match to it.  It can be stored for an eternity until you need it and then it is immediately available to provide instant heat.

The same cannot be said for nuclear power, hydro power, wind, tidal or solar power.  Nor can it be said for energy stored in batteries or capacitors.

Coal stores for millennia and lights in seconds with no processing.

Coal represents a small percentage of the power produced in most parts of Canada.

Not true in Alberta or Saskatchewan and questionable in Manitoba and BC where despite their Hydro capabilities they buy energy from the Coal Fired plants of Alberta and Saskatchewan. (BC buys cheap “dirty” electricity from Alberta and then sells its “clean” hydro-electricity to California at a premium to help Governor Ahnuld meet his green commitments).

In Ontario Coal only represents about 15% of the power in the province.

And you are having trouble dealing with power surges resulting in more brown-outs and black-outs 

And this could be easily be replaced with nuclear power which is just as economical if not more economical.

It couldn’t be easily replaced with  nuclear power and it shouldn’t be “replaced” with nuclear.  Nuclear plants should be built.  But they should be built to meet the baseline power requirements.  The 80% of the market demand that doesn’t change or is predictable. The coal fired generators should be retained for the same reason that more people are keeping gasoline generators at home: to meet the unexpected (and the uneconomical peaks).

Wind power is not as expensive as you think.  On a small home scale it's about 11 cents/KWh on a large scale its about 7 cents/KWh.  And these numbers have been falling fast and show no signs of stopping.

See previous comments about Adam Smith and unintended consequences of subsidization.

One reactor at Darlington produces 850 MW of steam 24/7 for 365 days a year.  That is piped, along with the steam from the rest of the reactors to a group of turbines which also run 24/7.  When a turbine needs to be serviced it is enclosed. It is at ground level. It is accessible.

A Wind Turbine is nominally about 2 MW these days.  That means that you need 425 wind turbines to produce the power that one Darlington reactor does – if the wind is blowing.  Most wind farms anticipate that the right winds will only blow around 25 to 30% of the time – with no known schedule for availability.
That means that you have to build 3 to 4 windfarms of 425 turbines and site them in different areas and hope that at least one of the farms will be in a local weather system that provides usable wind while the other farms are idle.  That means anything from 1275 to 1700 turbines.  Scattered across the countryside. Stuck on the top of 100 meter poles.  Accessed by helicopters. With servicemen deployed by safety lines to elevated platforms then required to work in cramped quarters with the tools and parts that they bring with them.

Ever forgotten a tool or discovered that you needed an unanticipated part?

1700 turbines to service versus 1-3 turbines – and then there is life expectancy.

Solar 5 years ago was 30 cents/KWh.  Today its 15 cents/KWh and also falling very fast.  Canadian tire is now selling solar powered home generators.

Canadian Tire also sells Solar Showers for camping (a 5 Gallon plastic bag you hang in a tree). I don’t plan on using them at home either.

As for electric cars.  The Chevy Volt is expected to have a range of over 1000km's on 40L of gasoline when using the engine to regenerate the battery and an electric only range of 62kms.  I don't call that short range.

4 litres per 100 km is pretty good.  I like hybrids. 
62 km is impressive for a battery operated vehicle.  But it still qualifies as an urban runaround.

ICE's have an efficiency of ~25%.  Electric motors ~95+%.

Absolutely.  Hybrids good.

Electric motors can go as high as 15000 RPM and have a virtually flat torque curve.  And don't require a transmission (Which gives ~20% efficiency loss).

Absolutely again. Hybrids good.  Fewer moving parts, less service and maintenance.

The only issue to date with electric motors is not size or power.  But it is energy storage.  The next generation of batteries will solve this problem.  The Tesla Roadster electric car with rather primitive Li-Ion batteries has a range of 300kms. http://www.teslamotors.com/

And there you have it.   And back to the advantages of Coal.  Energy storage.  Diesel is a really good compromise. Lots of carbon and just enough lots of hydrogen to make storing and transporting  the coal Edit: and storing and transporting is easier in confined spaces.  It doesn't have the shelf-life of coal but it is sufficiently long to make it a marketable commodity.


The Chevy Volt and GM's e-flex system will use a small advanced Li-Ion battery that the car can use to go 62kms on electric only range.  And can be recharged by plugging into the wall at home.  It also has a small gas engine.  The gas engine does not power the wheels.  It is only used to recharge the battery and this is a big advantage.  ICE's are most efficient in a very narrow RPM range.  With the engine only used to recharge the battery it can be optimized to run at only one RPM.  It will be like getting highway mileage all the time except better.

Have I said I like Hybrids?

Trains made by GM already use the E-flex concept.  Trains today use electric motors for their main source of propulsion and a diesel engine to recharge the battery.

Becoming monotonous. Hybrids.

City buses already use hybrid systems with a combination of electric motors and a diesel engine.

Agreed.

Sorry about the long blurb about electric motors but there is a lot of misconceptions about electric motors. I'm a mechanical engineer (hence my name) and my background is in the automotive industry.

I am a Food Scientist with a background in thermo-coagulation, fermentations, digestions, separations, evaporation and drying as well as designing, installing and commissioning plants in diverse locations where you have to carry your own fuel, generate your own energy, provide for your own service (unless volcanoes, tidal waves, snowstorms or the runway not washing out permit the service man to land)  and, on occasion, make your own process water.  You might consider me as a chemical engineer that happened to specialize in food - the world's most complex mix of chemicals.

I have had just about every “alternative” solution in the book thrown at me over the years.  And none of them made economic sense…… And then there were Carbon Credits. ::)

Edited to tidy up some erroneous/confusing statements.
 
Actually if there is a "crime" associated with the burning of coal it is in letting that concentrated CO2 be released to become dilute and diffuse.  It should be contained and applied to suitable environments to generate biomass - certain types of which we lack, notably farmaceuticals, foods, feeds and fertilizers.  CO2 at 2000 ppm contained in a temperature controlled greenhouse (maybe just a big cellophane bag) with water, will be much more effectively converted to trees and food and stuff that it will be drifting over a desert at 150 ppm.

There's the third part of my three part solution for stationary energy requirements: Nukes, Coal and Greenhouses.

For mobile uses: Diesel Hybrids (and electric runabouts for urban commutes and local deliveries and electric trains for short-range inter-city transport like Edmonton-Calgary or on the Windsor Montreal Corridor)
 
Some more on ethanol derived from cellulose:

http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/15-10/ff_plant

On a blackboard, it looks so simple: Take a plant and extract the cellulose. Add some enzymes and convert the cellulose molecules into sugars. Ferment the sugar into alcohol. Then distill the alcohol into fuel. One, two, three, four — and we're powering our cars with lawn cuttings, wood chips, and prairie grasses instead of Middle East oil.

Unfortunately, passing chemistry class doesn't mean acing economics. Scientists have long known how to turn trees into ethanol, but doing it profitably is another matter. We can run our cars on lawn cuttings today; we just can't do it at a price people are willing to pay.

Despite the line that cellulosic ethanol yeilds 80% more energy than required to grow and convert it, there is nothing in this article (or anywhere else) that suggests there is an effective and economical means of breaking down the cellulose into sugars for fermentation. Lets face it, if there was such a natural enzyme like the researchers are looking for, trees and shrubs made out of wood would not exist, and the plants that did fill those ecological niches would have trunks and branches made out of silicon or diamond.....

In the mean time, there is a golden opportunity for people to cash in on R&D dollars in attempts to make this happen. But, there is another:

http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/15-10/ff_plant_4tech

Jay Keasling's mantra: "Ethanol is for drinking, not driving." Dismissing the current craze for the biofuel, he points out that it produces only 85 percent of the energy of gasoline, requires retrofitting car engines, and is incompatible with existing oil pipelines. That's why Keasling, a chemical engineer at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, is trying to create a better alternative — his 50-person team is building microbes that can turn cellulosic biomass, not into ethanol but into a fuel molecularly similar to gasoline. The results, he says, will have higher energy content than ethanol and will be easier to extract and distribute. The approach is being explored by several other groups, including companies like Amyris Biotechnologies (which Keasling cofounded) and LS9 of nearby San Carlos; both have claimed success in the lab. The next challenge: producing the fuels in commercial-scale quantities.
 
Load leveling using UPS batteries the size of a bus. Before you run out to get some; sodium sulfur batteries run at the temperature of molten sulfur and any breach of the battery case would be an environmental disaster and health hazard:

http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19584/?nlid=607

Fixing the Power Grid

Big batteries will fight blackouts and could make renewable power economically viable.
By Peter Fairley

Large-scale power storage is crucial to our energy future: the Electric Power Research Institute, the U.S. utility industry's leading R&D consortium, says that storage would enable the widespread use of renewable power and make the grid more reliable and efficient. Recent announcements by utility giant American Electric Power (AEP), based in Columbus, OH, suggest that grid storage technologies are finally ready for commercial deployment in the United States. Last month, AEP ordered three multi-megawatt battery systems and set goals of having 25 megawatts of storage in place by 2010, and 40 times that by 2020.

"That was a dream four or five years ago; now it is happening," says AEP energy-storage expert Ali Nourai.

The AEP system uses a sodium-sulfur battery about the size of a double-decker bus (see below), plus power electronics to manage the flow of AC power in and out of the DC battery. Though new to the United States, the system has been used at the megawatt scale in Japan since the early 1990s; the battery was produced by NGK Insulators of Nagoya, Japan.

Charging Charleston: The utility American Electric Power (AEP) deployed this huge sodium-sulfur battery as part of a demonstration project in Charleston, WV. The battery provides 1.2 megawatts of power for up to seven hours, easing the strain on an overloaded substation. Trouble-free operation since installation last year convinced AEP that such energy-storage technology is ready for active duty.
Credit: AEP

Nourai says that AEP and other U.S. utilities gained confidence in the economics and reliability of storage thanks to a demonstration project in Charleston, WV, where AEP installed a large battery system in June 2006. In Charleston, peak demand in both summer and winter had overloaded transformers at local substations, causing blackouts. Rebuilding the substations to accommodate more power could have taken as much as three years. Instead, AEP spent just nine months installing a battery system that charges when demand for electricity is low and can deliver up to 1.2 megawatts for seven hours when demand peaks.

Two of AEP's new projects are slightly larger two-megawatt, seven-hour battery systems designed to provide similar quick fixes in areas with power-reliability problems. A battery in Milton, WV, for example, will provide backup electricity for customers in areas prone to blackouts from a weak power line. "When there is a blackout, the battery will pick up as many people as it can and continue to feed them," says Nourai. "They will not even know there was a blackout." The battery will postpone Milton's addition of a new substation and a high-voltage transmission line by five to six years.

When AEP decides to make more permanent upgrades to substations or completes construction of a new power line--a process that can take five or six years--it will simply move the nearest backup battery to another choke point. "It can be lifted with a forklift and loaded onto a flatbed truck," says Nourai. "Within a week we can have it up and operational at another site in our system."

Richard Baxter, author of Energy Storage: A Nontechnical Guide and chair of a conference held last week in New York City on investing in storage, says that AEP's new projects are a "good litmus test" for the industry. "Storage technologies are emerging as a viable, commercial-level product," Baxter says.

The emergence of a grid storage market is drawing in new battery developers. These include Firefly Energy of Peoria, IL, which is using high-surface-area nanostructured electrodes to revive lead-acid technology, and lithium battery developer Altair Nanotechnologies, based in Reno, NV. In June, multinational utility AES agreed to buy an unspecified number of Altair's batteries; CEO Alan Gotcher says that Altair will deliver a one-megawatt, 15-minute prototype by the end of this year.

AEP, meanwhile, is exploring a potentially more transformative role for storage: turning the ever-shifting power output of renewable resources such as wind and solar power into steady, dependable energy. The company plans to connect its third two-megawatt battery system to a group of wind turbines at an as-yet undetermined site. Nourai says that the goal is to learn whether batteries can smooth out short-term fluctuations in power flow from the turbines. If they can, utilities should be able to absorb larger levels of wind power on their grids.

But Nourai says that AEP also wants to determine whether storing wind energy can boost its value. There are at least two ways that this could happen. Wind energy produced at night could be stored for delivery during peak hours of the day, when the price of electricity spikes. And if the power delivered by wind farms were more predictable, it would be more profitable. When an independent generator such as a wind-farm operator sells to power distributors, it must promise to deliver a certain amount of power at a certain hour. While the details vary greatly in different regional and national power markets, wind-farm operators can be penalized if they fail to meet their commitments because the wind didn't blow as hard as expected. Systems that store a fraction of a wind farm's output when the wind is blowing can eliminate most of this risk.

Nourai notes that Japanese utilities are already installing energy-storage technologies to make wind power more reliable and profitable, thanks to government incentives that cover one-third of the cost of the storage system, and to the wider spread between Japan's day and night electricity prices. Nourai believes that NGK, which can currently produce 90 megawatts' worth of sodium-sulfur battery systems per year, is considering constructing a second factory to meet the resulting demand. Meanwhile, a study completed this year by Sustainable Energy Ireland, Ireland's energy-policy agency, concluded that time-shifting storage projects might already be profitable in Europe.

However, an expert panel assembled by the Electric Power Research Institute last year judged that storage costs needed to drop below $150 per kilowatt-hour to make such time shifting economically attractive in the United States; a report issued by the institute this spring estimates that systems employing NGK's sodium-sulfur batteries cost $300 to $500 per kilowatt-hour. That cost differential has fueled recent interest in solar-thermal-power plants that capture renewable energy in the form of heat, which is easier to store than electricity. (See "Storing Solar Power Efficiently.")

Copyright Technology Review 2007.
 
Compressed air.....nuclear......batteries???????

Come on guys. We are addicts. Oil addicts. We will do anything to get that fix. Pay any price to tap that reserve. We will go to the ends of the earth and back again to get that....high!

Maybe Oil Shale the solution??? It's like cocain....but more crack like in texture. :P

http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/30/magazines/fortune/Oil_from_stone.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2007103105
 
Actually, oil shale is an order of magnitude more difficult to extract than oil sands (it is trapped in the pores of rock, after all)

For short term usage, Methane clathrate may be the answer. Methane (natural gas) is trapped in a matrix of ice under certain conditions, and it seems there are vast quantities available (see map).

Of course, eventually nuclear energy will become dominant, simply due to the high energy density and relatively simple technology involved. Nuclear Fusion is the next step, and finally Solar energy when we can do large scale work in space to access the Sun's energy 24/7 (sorry alternative energy fans). Not enough energy? Try this
 
Now that oil prices are approaching $100 a barrell, and knowing that extaction cost for Oil in Alberta is hovering around $15-$30 at worst, I think it is becoming more economical to pursue the smaller oil wells that were never an option before.

I believe we have at least 50-100 years of sufficient oil supplies until we hit the half point of having consumed half the oil available on earth. Until that time, you never know what kind of alternative energy-efficient supply we may discover.
 
If this story is accurate, it will pull the rug out of oil prices for some time to come (although with negative effects on Alberta and the Canadian dollar)

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=aDUvf7YVd8y8&refer=latin_america

Petrobras' Tupi Oil Field May Hold 8 Billion Barrels (Update6)

By Carlos Caminada and Jeb Blount
Enlarge Image/Details

Nov. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Petroleo Brasileiro SA, Brazil's state-controlled oil company, said its Tupi field may contain as much as 8 billion barrels of oil and natural gas, an amount that could boost the country's reserves by 62 percent. The company's shares rose the most in more than nine years.

The announcement led a gain in the Brazilian stock market and boosted BG Group Plc and Galp Energia SGPS SA, partners in the field. The estimate for Tupi was made after a test well confirmed expectations, Petrobras, as the company is known, said today in a statement on its Web site. Tupi's total estimate would almost match that of Norway's 8.5 billion barrels of proved oil reserves, according to an estimate by BP Plc.

Brazil has proved reserves of oil and natural-gas equivalent to 14.4 billion barrels, Petrobras Chief Executive Officer Jose Sergio Gabrielli told reporters in Rio de Janeiro today. The oil at Tupi, located in the offshore Santos Basin, is a light grade, more valuable and cheaper to refine than the heavy crude that dominates Brazilian output.

``Tupi changes everything for Brazil and Petrobras,'' said Carlos Renato Nunes, an oil analyst with Sao Paulo-based brokerage Coinvalores CCVM who has a buy recommendation on Petrobras shares and doesn't own any. ``Tupi is not only huge, its light oil offers huge cost advantages.''

Nunes plans to increase his share-price estimates for Petrobras as a result of the find.

Petrobras' reserves of 13 billion barrels of oil and gas equivalent at the end of 2006 ranked fourth behind Exxon Mobil Corp., PetroChina Co. and BP, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

`Tiny Part'

The Tupi finding, which Petrobras estimates contains at least 5 billion barrels of oil and gas, is just a ``tiny'' part of a new oil province that the company believes is beneath existing fields, Gabrielli said. The potential new reserves may boost Brazil's oil reserves from the 17th biggest in the world to among the top 10, he said.

The Tupi field is in a region that lies about 250 kilometers (402 kilometers) off the coast of Rio de Janeiro in water as much as 3 kilometers deep. The oil rests a further 5 to 7 kilometers below the ocean floor.

Petrobras will be able to start producing from the field in five to six years, Gabrielli said. They may be able to start producing about 100,000 barrels a day from the field as early as 2010 or 2011, said Guilherme Estrella, Petrobras' exploration and production chief.

``That would only be a very small amount of the field's potential,'' Estrella said.

LNG, Power Generation

Petrobras is also studying plans to either liquefy or compress natural gas in the Tupi field aboard ships for transport to Brazil or use the gas to generate electricity on floating generating stations, Estrella said.

``This could make Brazil jump from an intermediate producer to among the world's largest producers,'' Dilma Rousseff, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's cabinet chief, said at a news conference in Rio de Janeiro.

As a result of the discovery, the government has removed 41 oil exploration blocks out of 312 up for sale later this month to reevaluate their potential, Rousseff said. All of the blocks in Brazil's Campos, Santos and Espirito Santo basins, the three most important in the country, have been pulled from the auction, she said.

``This allows us to reevaluate our resources without breaking any existing contracts,'' she said. ``When we are better aware of the potential, we will consider offering them at auction again.''

Shares Rise

Petrobras preferred shares, its most-traded class, rose 9.95 reais, or 14.2 percent, to 80.2 on the Sao Paulo stock exchange. That's the biggest gain since the stock climbed 18.2 percent on Sep. 15, 1998. The shares gained as much as 20 percent earlier today.

BG Group, with a 25 percent stake, gained 9.8 percent to 989 pence in London. Galp Energia, which holds 10 percent, posted its biggest one-day gain in Lisbon, rising 14 percent to a record close of 12.35 euros. The Bovespa Index climbed as much as 2.8 percent.

The Tupi oil is near Petrobras' main operations, so no major new installations will have to be built, Nunes said.

While it's possible to drill off some existing platforms, other big fields have experienced setbacks, said John Parry, an analyst at John S. Herold Inc. in Norwalk, Connecticut. BP Plc's Thunder Horse in the Gulf of Mexico has been delayed since 2005 because of storm damage and equipment failures.

By providing more light crude to Brazilian refineries, Tupi will free up more heavy crude, similar to Venezuelan oil, for Petrobras' refinery in Pasadena, Texas, Nunes said. Tupi may have enough oil to supply all U.S. needs for more than 14 months.

`Self-Sufficient Company'

Petrobras will have less need to export cheaper heavy crude and buy more expensive light crude to feed its refineries, which can't handle all the heavy oil the company produces.

``All that light crude has the potential of turning Petrobras from a net exporter of oil into a truly self-sufficient company,'' Nunes said. ``Their refineries can handle the oil and they'll be saved the losses on trading and costs of shipping to make fuel for Brazil.''

The field is three quarters the size of Kazakhstan's Kashagan field, which holds 12 billion barrels of recoverable crude and was the biggest find in the last 30 years.

``Even a 5 billion-barrel find number is the biggest find since Kashagan,'' said Andy Latham, vice president of exploration services at Wood Mackenzie Consultants Ltd. in London. ``This would be the number two for the past two decades for oil.''

Russia's Shtokman

There have only been a few gas discoveries in the past 20 years that would rival it, including the Shtokman field in Russia at 23 billion barrels of oil equivalent, and two other Russian finds in the 5 billion to 10 billion range, Latham said.

Tupi may also help reduce U.S. dependence on Venezuela, one of the U.S.'s main sources of imported oil.

``It punches a bit of a hole in Venezuela's bubble,'' Parry said. ``This certainly becomes a challenge to Venezuela, which is looking to get a Latin American coalition of countries together because Venezuela saw itself as the head honcho with the most reserves.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Carlos Caminada in Sao Paulo at at ccaminada1@bloomberg.net ; Jeb Blount in Rio de Janeiro at jblount@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: November 8, 2007 17:30 EST
 
I think it might soften the Canadian Dollar and also, more importantly, strengthen the US dollar, but the Canadian Dollar is not flying unsupported against the US.  It is the US Dollar that has lost ground against all other holding currencies.  I am less concerned about the collapse of the Canadian Dollar directly than about the collapse of the US currency. 

As we, the West, continue to struggle to secure Eurasia it seems to me to become more imperative to make the effort to secure the Americas - we need the labour force, internal market and resources of that free trade area to be able to afford the anchoring Navy of the OECD Navy.  The OECD is the organization with the most to lose IF the sea lanes are ever lost to the Centralizers.  It is their navies that will secure them and the US Navy is the Keystone.  Arthur Herman, Mahan, the Colomb brothers and Hakluyt have convinced me.  With the hemisphere and the US Navy as the key element of the 1000 ship navy then we can continue to support Scandinavia, Britain, Australia, all the island states - and have a shot at supporting coastal city states, like Hong Kong against the centralizers.

As well, as this article demonstrates - there are still riches to be found at sea.
 
if we want to get serious about kicking the fossil fuel habit we need to go all nuclear...

1) establish enough nuclear plants to take up the baseload. As new plants come online start taking fossil fuel plants offline but keep enough on standby for peak load and sudden demand events.

2a) start establishing additional nuclear plants to provide hyrdrogen to phase out transportation fuels by providing ICE gasoline to hydrogen conversion kits and hydrogen ICE engines in new vehicles eventually phasing in fuel cells

2b) establish an electric car support system... less likely as it would collapse the current fossil fuel transportation industry and dealing with spent batteries is an ecological nightmare. However this too could be fueled by hydrogen as remote refuelling stations could use a large bank of fuel cells connected to a hydrogen gas line for power to recharge electric vehicles.

3) continue to establish nuclear plants until there is enough to supply peak demand for power, and the non peak load is used to supplement the transportation hydrogen economy. Nuclear energy on this scale would be very cheap and surplus could be bled off in creating reserves of hydrogen or just burnt off until the plants could be throttled back.

this all depends on the development of a practical storage system for hydrogen... there are some nanotube and powder absorbtion systems that show promise but lack the funding and research to be viable at this time. if we dumped all the unfeasable non solutions the greenies are pushing like wind/solar/good feelings I'm sure the problem would be licked.

 
This kinetic energy recovery system sounds far more practical than hybrid electric systems in ordinary automobiles, since it seems smaller,lighter and less complex (being essentially an add-on to existing transmissions)

http://www.flybridsystems.com/index.html

Flybrid Systems LLP is an innovative engineering company taking a fresh look at hybrid vehicle technology.

The company has developed an entirely mechanical high-speed flywheel based energy storage and recovery system which meets the proposed 2009 Formula One regulations but which is also suitable for other racing formulae and for road vehicles.

The Flybrid device is powerful, small and light giving a better power to weight ratio than any existing automotive hybrid technology. This higher power makes it possible to store more energy during short braking periods dramatically increasing system effectiveness. The system is also very efficient with up to 70% of braking energy being returned to the wheels to drive the vehicle back up to speed. The device is readily recycled and relatively inexpensive to make as it can be made entirely from conventional materials.

From their Silverstone offices Flybrid Systems are pursuing the onward development of this technology for road vehicles. Computer simulations suggest that fuel consumption savings of up to 65% are possible for certain vehicle types and the promise of big reductions in CO2 emissions have already attracted strong interest from major car makers.
 
A different approach. I'm not sure how it will work (the time scale of moving mechanical parts i.e. the steam pistons mentioned is millions of times slower than the time scale of nuclear reactions.), but good on them for trying:

http://www.generalfusion.com/t5_general_fusion.php

General Fusion's Approach

General Fusion is using the MTF approach but with a new, patented and cost effective compression system to collapse the plasma.

GF will build a ~3 meter diameter spherical tank filled with liquid metal (lead-lithium mixture). The liquid is spun to open up a vertical cylindrical cavity in the center of the sphere (vortex). Two spheromaks (magnetized plasma “smoke ring”) are injected from each end of the cavity. They merge in the center to form a single magnetized plasma target. The outside of the sphere is covered with pneumatic rams. The rams use compressed steam to accelerate pistons to ~50 m/s. These pistons simultaneously impact the outside of the sphere and launch a spherical compression wave in the liquid metal. As the wave travels and focuses towards the center, it becomes stronger and evolves into a strong shock wave. When the shock arrives in the center, it rapidly collapses the cavity with the plasma in it. At maximum compression the conditions for fusion are briefly met and a fusion burst occurs releasing its energy in fast neutrons. The neutrons are slowed down by the liquid metal causing it to heat up. A heat exchanger transfers that heat to a standard steam cycle turbo-alternator to produce electricity for the grid. Some of the steam is used to run the rams. The lithium in the liquid metal finally absorbs the neutrons and produces tritium that is extracted and used as fuel for subsequent shots. This cycle is repeated about one time per second.

The use of low-tech pneumatic rams in place of sophisticated high power electrical systems reduces the cost of the energy delivered to the plasma by a factor of 10 making such a power plant commercially competitive. Because the fusion plasma is totally enclosed in the liquid metal, the neutron flux at the reactor wall is very low. Other fusion schemes struggle with a high neutron flux at the wall that rapidly damages the machine and also produces some radio-active material. Frequent robotic replacement of the then radio-active plasma facing components is a costly problem for many fusion machines.

General Fusion has patented this technology and believes that a reactor working on this principle could be built at a much lower cost than using the old magnetic and laser fusion approaches. Such a power plant would make fusion a commercially viable clean power source.

 
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